Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,310 84,488 70.81% 323

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 4669 6188 12 1818
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 3412 4611 6 1606
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 3220 4435 16 504
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 3210 5022 7 2393
21 West Anchorage 3192 4329 10 1547
26 Anchorage - Huffman 3125 4312 9 1579
27 Anchorage - Basher 3015 4111 7 1293
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 3006 4042 7 1291
31 Homer/South Kenai 2773 4173 8 32
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2762 3848 11 1403
34 Mendenhall Valley 2690 4075 13 3637
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2646 3691 20 1431
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2633 3739 5 1538
04 Western Fairbanks 2554 3505 6 2057
16 Anchorage - College Gate 2534 3399 10 1041
35 Sitka/Petersburg 2293 3273 6 29
17 Anchorage - University 2284 3135 4 1141
12 Chugiak/Gateway 2205 3032 11 1877
29 North Kenai 2075 3046 9 39
23 Anchorage - Taku 2065 3021 11 1103
10 Rural Mat-Su 2032 2772 9 1659
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 2006 2659 7 373
11 Greater Palmer 2003 2688 14 2868
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1922 2712 6 1598
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1809 2780 9 12
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1763 2408 3 470
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1741 2574 9 1358
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1631 2236 7 1880
07 Greater Wasilla 1584 2274 7 2715
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1564 2139 6 1189
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1552 2170 5 633
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1524 2203 16 5
15 Elmendorf 1501 2209 12 588
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1425 2351 3 27
03 North Pole/Badger 1195 1692 3 1010
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 1113 1493 4 803
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 700 1192 8 43
38 Lower Kuskokwim 394 653 0 10
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 311 524 3 374
40 Arctic 311 540 4 17
99 NA 44 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.